Meredith Etherington-smith
Ebullient fashion journalist, Dali biographer and close friend of Diana, Princess of Wales
MEREDITH ETHERINGTONSMITH, who has died of a heart attack aged 73, was, variously, a newspaper columnist, author of an acclaimed biography of Salvador Dali, an etiquette guru, indefatigable hostess, fashion journalist, art expert, sometime “well-worn, size 20-ish” Burberry model, curator of sales at Christie’s of the wardrobes of Diana, Princess of Wales and Margaret Thatcher, and, not least, as co-presenter of Channel 4’s The Dinner Party Inspectors (2003) – a star of “bitch TV”.
Large and loud, with red hair, a fruity accent and a commanding basso profundo voice (“That’s 50 years of smoking, I’m afraid”) she developed a sideline after the death of Diana, being interviewed by US media as a “close friend” of the princess.
Always trenchant in her opinions, Meredith Etherington-smith could be intimidating. But she was also funny, kind and generous, encouraging younger colleagues in their careers and forming many lasting friendships.
As an expert on style her “guidelines for good taste” (the title of a 1988 article in The Daily Telegraph) included “never, never hang anyone else’s ancestors”. “Style and manners are both memorable and free,” she would often advise, “so stock up.”
On Channel 4’s seven-part series The Dinner Party Inspectors, the pro forma for Come Dine With Me, she and Tatler magazine’s Victoria Mather were seen glugging away in a back room while expertly casting their eyes over some hapless person’s attempt at entertaining next door, an endeavour the Telegraph’s John Preston likened to “trying to teach napkin-folding to a chimps’ tea party”.
When Deborah Ross invited the pair to dinner at her house for an article in The Independent she confessed to dreading the occasion, but ended up, after the party had consumed a “staggeringly excessive” quantity of alcohol, in regarding her guests as a “total scream”.
Meredith, “the sort of Sw-something woman who could be very difficult and bossy in Dickins & Jones”, turned out to be a “gorgeous if compulsive flatterer” with a nice line in dinner party games: “She suggests we vote for celebrities we’d sleep with out of pity.
“Actually, being Meredith, she puts it rather more plainly than that; she says: ‘Let’s vote for our top five mercy f---s!’ Andrew Lloyd Webber is a popular choice, as are Robin Cook, Jeremy Beadle, John Redwood and Tom Cruise.”
She was born Meredith Dups on January 30 1946, the daughter of Louis Dups, a commodity broker, and Mary, née Moore, of Glanffrwd Hall, Merioneth, Wales, and brought up in Kent. “My father,” she told Deborah Ross, “was … a gambler …[my parents] just about managed by dint of hocking my mother’s engagement ring to crack me through school. I’ve earned my own living since I was 17 … I used to work in a pub as the bustiest barmaid in town. People would stuff notes down my cleavage. Gangsters would come in and I would lean seductively over the bar.”
In fact she was educated at Benenden and at St Martin’s School of
Art, followed by secretarial college. She dated her interest in fashion to 1962, when she walked into a secondhand shop and bought a vintage 1924 black-beaded Chanel evening dress. “Nobody was doing vintage in those days but I loved that old dress, and I left a trail of beads wherever I went,” she recalled, describing herself as “a Sixties kind of a babe.”
She began her career in fashion journalism, specialising, oddly, in men’s fashion and becoming fashion editor of The Tailor and Cutter.
In the 1970s, as London editor of Paris Vogue, she claimed to have given Cecil Beaton his last photographic assignment. She also spent a year in America as the first woman editor of GQ magazine, where she booked the photographer Bruce Weber for his first fashion shoot.
Back in London, by the early 1980s she had embarked on a long career as a freelance journalist, writing for magazines and newspapers including The Daily and Sunday Telegraphs. She was appointed deputy and features editor of Harpers & Queen magazine in 1983.
Along the way she profiled everyone from Andy Warhol to Ella Fitzgerald, claimed to have helped launch the
careers of John Galliano and Joanna Lumley, and became a great friend of Karl Lagerfeld, to whom she wrote a touching tribute after his death last year. She was also, for a time, European fashion adviser to Bloomingdale’s and edited Design
Bazaar.
In 1991 she became one of the first women to write, in a half-page article in The
Daily Telegraph, about the breast cancer for which she had undergone a radical mastectomy the previous year: “I thought it was important not to be a closet cancer case but to externalise it to bring it into the daylight and look at it dispassionately,” she explained. Not everyone approved: “I got sacks of hate mail saying how could I talk about it?” she said later.
From the early 1990s Meredith Etherington-smith expanded her area of expertise into modern and contemporary art. For a time she edited Artreview and she was a cofounder, in 2004, of Art Fortnight London, of which she became vicechairman. Later she was London editor of artinfo.com
Also in the 1990s she joined Christie’s, becoming a link between the auctioneers and the world of glossy magazines, helping to establish Christie’s reputation as the auction house of choice for private collectors. She served variously as global chief marketing officer, editor-in-chief of
Christie’s Magazine and as a curator of several high-profile auctions.
When Diana, Princess of Wales decided to sell more than 70 of her evening gowns in a charity auction at Christie’s in New York, in 1997, Meredith Etherington-smith worked with her to organise the sale, later recalling her surprise at discovering how “naturally funny” the princess was: “We used to have a motto, ‘more fun, more often’.”
She was due, she said, to have had lunch with the princess on the Tuesday after her death in Paris. Instead she attended her funeral and was left with an abiding memory of the squeak of guardsmen’s boots as they bore the princess’s coffin up and down the aisle at Westminster Abbey: “All you could hear was the squeak of those boots.”
In 2015 she curated the sale at Christie’s in London of more than 200 of Lady Thatcher’s suits, dresses, handbags, items of jewellery and other possessions, revealing that the former prime minister took a particular interest in buttons and would send her personal assistant, Cynthia Crawford, to trawl through button shops all over the world before choosing which would go best with which outfit.
Among several others Meredith Etherington-smith also curated the 1999 sale of Marilyn Monroe’s clothing and personal effects (including the “Happy birthday, Mr President” sequinned dress), and the 2011 auction of Elizabeth Taylor’s wardrobe and jewels.
Meredith Etherington-smith was never self-conscious about her size, happily posing for a “Big and Bold” fashion feature in The Daily Telegraph in 1978, when she was described as a “cheerful size 18”. In 2000, by which time she had grown to “size 20ish”, her friend, the photographer Mario Testino, invited her to take part in a Burberry photoshoot alongside Kate Moss and other assorted “thinnies”.
But while her fellow models were being shoehorned into Burberry plaids, Meredith Etherington-smith was photographed holding up a “ridiculously small” pair of Burberry knickers a salesgirl had given her to try on by mistake and playing a shoplifter shovelling
“a lot of rather delicious leather goodies” into a huge Burberry carrier bag.
Meredith Etheringtonsmith was the author of several books, of which her best-known, The Persistence of Memory (1994), a biography of Salvador Dali, was translated into 12 languages. She also wrote biographies of the jeweller Laurence Graff, the designer Axel Vervoordt and the fashion designer Jean Patou.
The “It” Girls (1987, with her second husband, Jeremy Pilcher) was a biography of Elinor Glyn and Lucy Duff-gordon; La France Mandarine (2009, with Philippe Albou) was an account of the influence of French art on turn-of-the-century Shanghai; The Secret History Of The Handbag (2014), was an attempt to chart the accessory’s chronology, from the reticules of the 17th century to today’s Mulberry Alexas and Chanel 2.55s.
She married, in 1967, the artist and designer Nick Etherington-smith. The marriage was dissolved and she married, secondly, in 1981, Jeremy Pilcher, a banker, who survives her with two stepdaughters.
Meredith Etherington-smith, born January 30 1946, died January 25 2020